Paramount Leaders Avoid Warner Bros. Questions in Q4 Earnings Call

Paramount Skydance leaders steered clear of any discussion of the company’s latest bid to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery as it unveiled fourth-quarter 2025 earnings report on Wednesday that reflected declines in the company’s core linear TV business but momentum for Paramount+ and other streaming platforms.

CEO David Ellison and Paramount president Jeff Shell fielded questions from Wall Street analysts about the company’s fourth quarter results, which marks the first full quarter that studio has been owned by Ellison.

Ellison said flatly that Paramount’s film slate “underperformed” in 2025. Ellison and Shell were pressed about the potential for the NFL to trigger its option to renegotiate its TV rights deals starting in 2029. And Ellison told analysts that he is bullish on streaming’s ad-supported FAST channel sector, and that Paramount eventually will invest “10x” in engineering talent as part of the revitalization plan for the studio.

READ MORE: Paramount Skydance Sees Q4 Loss Widen Amid TV Downturn

Dennis Cinelli, Paramount’s newly appointed chief financial officer, addressed the 2026 projection for Paramount Pictures’ film business as having a down year overall compared to 2025 despite having more theatrical releases on deck. Paramount said it expects to have 16 theatrical releases this year, compared to eight in 2025.

“We do expect the actual revenue to decline. We’ve been very clear overall that we’re in a real rebuild phase of that business. As we execute that rebuild, we’ll see some of that come through in 2026, but mostly that will come through in future years. And so even with the actual revenue dropping down, we do expect better cost management as well as benefits from our licensing deals to drive studio profitability up,” Cinelli said.

Ellison’s Skydance Media took over Paramount Global last August. “We inherited a slate that has underperformed. We’re going to see significant improvement in the profitability of the film slate this year,” Ellison said.

Pressed for examples of how the new regime is executing its plan to use technological upgrades to drive operating improvements at the more than 100-year-old studio, Ellison pointed to changes already made but he indicated that there is much more to come.

“When you look at the engineers that we have at the company currently, you can expect us to kind of 10x the size of the headcount that we are basically investing towards this,” Ellison said. “We really want to be in a position where we can be a leader in the industry in terms of how this transformation is shaped.”

Ellison and Shell were grilled about the growth and profit forecasts for the Paramount+ streamer. Ellison also made a point of endorsing the company’s Pluto TV platform that serves up dozens of free ad-supported streaming television channels (aka FAST) around the world.

“I am a big believer in in the FAST space. When you really look globally, FAST is something that is only going to grow in importance. And when you look at the signs that are also really encouraging on Pluto is that we are seeing engagement grow,” Ellison said. “The headwind we’re facing is really monetization, and we’re doing several things to correct that. And while Pluto has always been a leader in the FAST space — it’s a profitable platform — but it was from our perspective under-invested in by the previous owners and managers, both in a content standpoint as well as from a product standpoint.”

As for the NFL, Shell projected confidence that Paramount’s CBS would remain a cornerstone of the league’s distribution strategy for games for many years to come. The NFL has the right to re-negotiate deals that were sealed in 2021 and stretch out through 2033. Shell pointed to the power of the regionalization that CBS allows for with NFL coverage on Sunday with its AFC package, much as Fox does with its NFC package for Sundays. If the NFL restarts the contract, the price is expected to be astronomical.

“We feel pretty confident we’re going to be in business with the NFL for a long time, and we have properly accounted for what we expect to be whatever impact of that negotiation in our kind of internal forecast going forward,” Shell said. “One of the unique things about our relationship with the NFL, and I would actually say it’s probably somewhere to Fox’s relationship with the NFL is the anchor of their flywheel and the anchor of their reach is really the reach of both CBS and Fox on Sunday afternoons. That reach, which has really helped contribute for both of our benefit to the success of the NFL, is by our vast array of both owned and operated stations, of which we have 28, and affiliates. It’s important that those games get regionalized, and that we aggregate that viewership and maximize the viewership in each market for the best game, both for us and Fox, and that accrues to the benefit of the NFL and to us and really maximizes the reach on any given Sunday.”